“Moonlighting” is a wickedly pointed movie that takes
a simple little story, tells it with humor and truth, and turns it into a knife
in the side of the Polish government. In its own way, this response to the
crushing of Solidarity is as powerful as Andrzej Wajda’s “Man of
Iron.” It also is more fun.
The
movie takes place in London, during the weeks just before and after the banning
of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It begins, actually, in Warsaw, with a
mystifying scene in which a group of plotters are scheming to smuggle some
hardware past British customs. They’re plotters, all right; their plot is to
move into a small house in London and remodel it, knocking out walls, painting
ceilings, making it into a showplace for the Polish government official who has
purchased it.
The
official’s plan is simplicity itself: By bringing Polish workers to London on
tourist visas, he can get the remodeling done for a fraction of what British
workman would cost him. At the same time, the workers can earn good wages that
they can take back to Poland and buy bicycles with. The only thing nobody
counts on is the upheaval after Solidarity is crushed and travel to and from
Poland is strictly regulated.
Jeremy
Irons, of “The French Lieutenant's Woman,” plays the lead in the
film. He’s the only Polish workman who can speak English. Acting as foreman, he
guides his team of men through the pitfalls of London and safely into the house
they’re going to remodel. He advises them to keep a low profile, while he
ventures out to buy the groceries and (not incidentally) to read the
newspapers. When he finds out about the crisis in Poland, he keeps it a secret
from his comrades.
The
daily life of the renovation project falls into a pattern, which the film’s
director, Jerzy Skolimowski, intercuts with the adventures of his hero. Jeremy
Irons begins to steal things: newspapers, bicycles, frozen turkeys. He concocts
an elaborate scheme to defraud the local supermarket, and some of the movie’s
best scenes involve the subtle timing of his shoplifting scam, which involves
the misrepresentation of cash-register receipts. He needs to steal food because
he’s running out of money, and he knows his group can’t easily go home again.
There’s also a quietly hilarious, and slightly sad, episode involving a
salesgirl in a blue-jeans store. Irons, pretending to be more naive than he is,
tries to pick the girl up. She’s having none of it.
“Moonlighting”
invites all kinds of interpretations. You can take this simple story and set it
against the events of the early 80’s, and see it as a kind of parable. Your
interpretation is as good as mine. Is the house itself Poland, and the workmen
Solidarity — rebuilding it from within, before an authoritarian outside force
intervenes? Or is this movie about the heresy of substituting Western values
(and jeans and turkeys) for a home-grown orientation? Or is it about the
manipulation of the working classes by the intelligentsia? Or is it simply a
frontal attack on the Communist Party bosses who live high off the hog while
the workers are supposed to follow the rules?
Like
all good parables, “Moonlighting” contains not one but many
possibilities. What needs to be insisted upon, however, is how much fun this
movie is. Skolimowski, a Pole who has lived and worked in England for several
years, began writing this film on the day that Solidarity was crushed, and he
filmed it, on a small budget and with a small crew, in less than two months: He
had it ready for the 1982 Cannes Film Festival where it was a major success.
It’s successful, I think, because it tells an interesting narrative in a
straightforward way. Skolimowski is a natural storyteller. You can interpret
and discuss “Moonlighting” all night. During the movie, you’ll be
more interested in whether Irons gets away with that frozen turkey.
